I just want to preface this post by saying/acknowledging that I am waaay behind on my reading goals for the year. But you know what? I still read some damn good books, and at the end of the day, I’ll always take quality over quantity.
In an earlier post, I talked about how this blog space is evolving a bit to make room for other topics outside of travel – in particular, Black Lives Matter and politics. You’ll see this reflected in my summer reading because George Floyd’s murder happened a week before Memorial Day weekend, so from that point I made a conscious effort to lean into reading books by Black authors.
Without further ado, and in reverse-chronological order, here’s my full 2020 summer reading wrap-up.
- How to Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
I know, I know – you, your neighbor, and your well-to-do aunt also probably bought this book. I think it took about a week after George Floyd died for the book to completely sell out everywhere, which is sort of morbidly fascinating because, as I’m learning, these sorts of books have been around for ages, not to mention the activists and movements that the books talk about.
I found this book to be a nice entry point for people like me who felt like rows of previously unnoticed literary doors started opening up at the end of May. It’s not that I didn’t know that racism was alive and well in the US, I just hadn’t ever gone further than simply living with that knowledge. Kendi, as a straight Black man, creates an environment conducive to learning on the threshold of these doors through his how-to-that-is-actually-a-memoir. My biggest takeaway was that “racist” is both a noun and a verb, but Whites especially tend to conflate the two due to the sharp social reprimand the word carries. But the fact of the matter is that most racism occurs as a verb – an action, an articulated stereotype, or an inaction. Thus, neutrality begets more racism.
2. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson
This book began as an op-ed published in the Washington Post after the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. (Michael Brown’s story is this: he and his friend were walking in the middle of the street. A policeman came and told them to use the sidewalk. Brown ended up getting shot and left dead on the ground for four hours.)
In her op-ed, historian Anderson coined the term “white rage” to describe the violent anger Whites express over Black American advancement. This eventually became the name of her book, which details a Black version of American history that is both infuriating and appalling – how are we not learning any of this in school? It’s the plaintive bleat I can’t restrain myself from making, even though I know that the answer is in the cliche: history is written by the victors.
3. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This was actually my second time reading this book. I first read it back in college on the recommendation of a friend and teammate, and I really feel that the book only gets better with more reads.
From a human perspective, this book is such a beautifully wrought piece of literary empathy for so many facets of the human existence that you don’t even realize that isolating those facets identifies contentious political issues today – immigration, mental health and the conversations around it, African blackness American Blackness, and womanhood as a sisterhood.
4. The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
In August, I thought I’d ease off the literary gas pedal with a true “summer read.” I’ve seen The Nightingale appear on summer reading lists every year since it was first released, so I figured it would be the perfect lighthearted romance read to bring with me on vacation. Instead, I ended up laughing, screeching, and sobbing over this masterfully wrought portrait of two small-town French sisters and their lives over the course of World War II.
I’ve never been a big history of the world wars junkie, but WOW WHAT A DIFFERENCE PERSPECTIVE MAKES. I’d honestly never heard anything about the female experience during times of war, but now that I have I’m frothing-mad that I haven’t heard more. Seriously, where the eff would men be without women to hold down the home fort? Now that’s a history class I would take – and stay awake for.
5. American Oligarchs: The Kushners, The Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power by Andrea Bernstein
This has been sitting on my shelf since I got back to France in May. I knew it was going to be a doozy, so I gave it a bunch of side-eye before deciding to take the plunge after returning from vacation. I can’t recommend it enough, of course.
It’s an exhausting read in the way a triathlon or marathon housekeeping day is exhausting; there’s just always more to learn about the behind the scenes of these two families and it’s so meticulously researched that you can practically feel the self-importance of each individual word on the page. None of them would be there if they didn’t serve the purpose of illuminating exactly how corrupt and dysfunctional the American political system and the families that play with its levels truly are. Now that I do, I ignore the vast majority of news surrounding these families because the celebrity-gossip-esque coverage makes me want to break out in hives and also serves to keep the very people we want out of the lives of the American people in the spotlight of their own manufactured self-importance.
